


Something in Common

by maskedbeliever



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust - Philip Pullman
Genre: Abuse, Ageplay, Biting, Coercion, Deal With the Devil, Degradation, Dæmons, F/M, Forced Orgasm, Grooming, Hair-pulling, Insults, Manipulation, PIV, Penis in Vagina, Rape, Sexual Violence, Threats, Violence, Virginity, Virginity Kink, age gap, age kink, hyena hierarchy, no happy ending, noncon, violence against dæmons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 09:27:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29774085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maskedbeliever/pseuds/maskedbeliever
Summary: Before the events of  "La Belle Sauvage" and long before his arrest and conviction, Gerard Bonneville meets a girl with a dæmon which has settled in the form of the same species as his awful hyena dæmon.The young woman thinks this means they will have a great deal in common and sees no problem in pursuing a friendship with the older man she meets in the park. Bonneville wastes no time in turning on the charm—he feels entitled to the girl.Pornographic and not recommended for people seeking a bright and happy ending.
Relationships: Gerard Bonneville/Original Character
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	1. Matching Dæmons

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to AdelaCathcart for support and inspiration.

When Sotirios settled it felt _right_ that he be large and soft, even if his form smelled worse than any dog. He'd been in the shape of a hyena more and more and it just seemed to work. Years ago, Esther would have balked at the idea of him settling at all, but when it eventually happened, he'd already looked like a spotted hyena long enough that neither of them were sure which moment it had been precisely that he _stuck_. It was around the same time that Esther's wavy hair began to change from the blond of her childhood to a browner shade.

Esther was plenty social and although she never found herself at the top of any circle she ran in, there was some pride in having a large, impressive dæmon who weighed nearly twenty kilograms more than almost every other dæmon she knew personally. It gave her an unexpected sense of safety as she moved further into her teens and further away from family and out into the wider world. Sotirios, despite his size and despite what people seemed to expect when they met Esther, was as friendly and polite as the girl. Agreeable to a fault. Sometimes Esther had to work harder to prove that she wasn't some scavenger, that she was a team player, that she was eager to please. Teachers unfailingly wrote that Esther was a pleasure to have in class, even if her grades middled.

Esther and Sotirios resigned themselves to the idea that hyenas, and thus dæmons who resembled them, would be stuck with a nasty reputation while lions would keep their crowns. They'd need to work for recognition if they wanted it. It wasn't fair, but Esther's father always said life wasn't fair... and neither was life under his roof. Esther's parents made her older sister Geneviève (and small poodle dæmon Bastijn) come home earlier in the evening because it wasn't as safe for her. Such a curfew had never been set in stone for Esther, although there was an understanding that she be home before bedtime. This left a rift between the sisters. Geneviève's resentment was quiet, but Esther wished she'd just scream and get it all out. It would have been easier to handle that way.

Homework was easiest to do outside. It was hard for Esther to focus on any one thing for too long. If she went to the park, though, Sotirios could watch all of the people and birds, and it made them feel like all of her predisposition to distraction could be channeled into him. She got hours of reading done in the park on sunny days while Sotirios walked laps around her and sometimes even spoke with the most gossipy dæmons of passersby.

And one day he said, "Hey Esther, look."

The girl looked up and her brown eyes had to adjust from reading the page to following her dæmon's gaze in the distance. "What?" She asked, glancing at the footpath. It was a busy time of day—was it time for people to be leaving work already? It must be. But as soon as she focused again she understood precisely what Sotirios wanted her to see.

A man with a hyena-formed dæmon. And not just a hyena-formed dæmon, but a _fellow spotted hyena-formed dæmon_. The first they'd ever seen! And the man already stared back at them. 

Esther's first mistake was believing that this would mean they would all have a great deal in common.

Bonneville and his dæmon spotted the girl and her dæmon in the same moment. The sight so effectively knocked the wind out of the man that his dæmon didn't even let out a cackle until after a few seconds passed. The hideous sound made others on the footpath avoid her, but the noise was—for once—far away from Bonneville's ears. He ran predatory calculations in his head on what his best angle of approach should be long before making any conscious decision to choose this girl. Would this little French girl know, he wondered, that the difference between their dæmons was more than the difference between a tiger and a housecat? Or would she assume that he was like her? Could he be lucky enough to have this girl delivered to him like fresh meat from the butcher?

His dæmon stifled her laughter but leaned on his leg to wheeze. He used his knee to push her off and grabbed her scruff until his trimmed fingernails dug into the flesh between her thick fur until his neck hurt too. The message was clear: _Do not ruin this for me, bitch._ This might be the only time in her miserable life that she could ever make it _easier_ for him to prey and if she was the reason it failed, he couldn't yet _imagine_ how he would punish her.

Only when the girl waved did he let go of his drooling dæmon. Bonneville walked up the sloping grass hill to greet the young woman and to assess her. So much of his actions at this early stage felt mechanical, running through a confident algorithm of his own creation, but he allowed himself _some_ optimism. He was an accomplished predator already. If taking advantage of the young wasn't more criminal than the direction his experimental theology work was going, he could have had a doctorate in that just as easily.

No study was required on this girl, he decided early. Maybe even no preparation. She had _that fucking dæmon_ and already he could not shake a sense of entitlement that had fallen onto his shoulders. She was made for him, he felt. He didn't even know her name.

"Good evening, young lady," he began. Formal, polite, but smiling like he had known her for years. His dæmon allowed herself a single hoot of amusement before she was able to control herself, maybe because she felt her human imagining how hard he would have kicked her if he could have gotten away with it right there in the park. "It's such a pleasure to see a similar dæmon, no?"

The girl had already stood up to meet him halfway and brushed grass off of her skirt, pushed her hair out of her eyes. She had the glow of someone who had been allowed to glide through life without ever learning that she was as fragile as a glass figurine. She hurried through her words when she reached him and shook his hand. "You're the only other person I've ever seen with another dæmon that settled looking like a spotted hyena!"

"I'll consider that a privilege," he said. "And I can only hope we'll live up to your expectations. Do you know much about the animals they're imitating?"

He suspected the answer but still felt a sly relief when she shrank back a few inches to tell him. "Not particularly, no. I know they're pack animals that compete with lions, famous for the laughing of course. Do you?"

Bonneville nodded, but didn't let her direct the conversation. "My name is Gerard, and yours?" Better to just give a first name. It avoided identifying himself entirely and it made things easier to let the girl think that he saw her as someone he wanted to jump right to a first name basis with.

"I'm Esther," she said. Then she indicated her soul with pride. "This is Sotirios."

The girl's male dæmon was notably smaller than Bonneville's female, but the man paid more attention to a few other undeniable differences that filled him with loathing for his own. Sotirios looked relaxed and affable, alert to things happening all around him but not worried by them. He was the kind of dæmon that you'd look for if you were hiring someone to work on a team that you intended to lead. He did not bare his teeth or laugh at inappropriate intervals. His black eyes were not dark pits of rage. There was no desire to control radiating from his spotted fur.

Bonneville inclined his head to Sotirios, but did not introduce his own dæmon. She slunk from behind him to approach Sotirios and whispered something in his large ear. He perked up at first, then looked at her with such shock that Bonneville knew he had to distract the Esther from whatever their dæmons had started saying between each other.

"How long has it been since he settled?" Bonneville asked. He didn't actually care about that, and he didn't even care how old the girl was, but it was the normal, polite thing to ask. His dæmon kept whispering to Esther's, using her careful words and size to push him out of the girl's peripheral vision.

"I think... about two years," Esther guessed, giving Bonneville a shrug, tilting her head. She started to turn to check on her dæmon, but Bonneville's arm reached up to touch her cheek with two fingers to redirect her gaze back to him. She didn't fight the touch at all.

He withdrew his arm when he had her eye contact and kept conversation. This time she didn't look away, and he made sure she knew they had plenty in common.

Esther's second mistake was leaving the park with Gerard. She always had trouble saying no to people, but in the moment he made her forget that it was _possible_ to reject an invitation. In fact, she made it several steps towards leaving before she remembered that she needed to step back to get her bookbag and homework.

Gerard waited, but there was a palpable storm of impatience around him that his smile could not conceal. She felt like she was being inconvenient by needing to collect her things. That she _herself_ was an inconvenience. "Forgive me," she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder. The moment she reached his side he slithered an arm around hers, hooking their elbows. It caught her by surprise, making her stare at his arm with her lips parted for a few seconds too long, but she didn't pull her arm back. It would be rude to do that, right?

He seemed like he had something in mind for where they would be going, so she tried to come up with the best way to ask him what _he_ had come up with when she heard Sotirios whine behind them. Esther stopped to look over her shoulder, and Gerard paused reluctantly. She put eyes on her dæmon, his head held low, while Gerard's dæmon giggled and whispered something else in one of his huge ears. He looked bewildered and out of his depth, the way that his human felt talking to the grown man. Esther didn't get long to look before Gerard nudged her along and provided another distraction. 

"I'm sure they're as happy to get to know each other as we are," he said.

He made her laugh and sometimes she made him smile. He asked her questions that made her feel important and grown-up. When she tried to ask more questions, he told her that he was an experimental theologian, but insisted that he wouldn't bore her with his work details. Gerard let her talk about herself longer than she could remember anyone ever wanting to listen before. _It must be because of our matching dæmons,_ she thought. _Some kind of friendship is destined to emerge from that._

When they reached his apartment, Bonneville let Esther and the dæmons enter first. He bolted and locked the door behind them and repocketed his keys. In a perfectly natural voice, the same voice he'd been using all evening to learn about her life, he asked, "Esther, what do you like to masturbate to?"

This was where the line was finally crossed, but he had known that ahead of time. Had chosen that moment specifically to apply the most uncomfortable pressure. A little growl came from Sotirios, but Bonneville's dæmon drowned him out with howling laughter and snapped at him, shocking Esther's innocent dæmon and making him skitter back over hardwood floors until he came to stand between Esther and Gerard with his ribs against her thighs.

Esther didn't move, apparently torn between the frighteningly personal question and the sight of her dæmon under attack. She reached a hand for poor Sotirios and wove it into his fur, presumably for comfort. "What?" she breathed to the man.

"You heard me the first time," Bonneville said.


	2. Complementary Dæmons

"If you don't let me leave right away, I'll tell my father," Esther said quickly.

Bonneville was caught off guard not by her attempted threat but by how _weak_ it was. He had no response prepared for such a pathetic reaction and stared her down for a moment. His face dropped its smile, leaving only his intense stare in the combined kitchen-dining-living room of his small flat.

"Suppose I kill you?" he sneered. "Then who would you tell? Nobody. Don't be so _stupid_ , Esther. You won't tell _anyone_ what we do here."

Sotirios growled between them. With his short tail tucked between his legs, he didn't even manage to bare his teeth. Bonneville didn't have to say anything, he merely exhaled slowly when his dæmon found her use. She lunged at Sotirios with her lips pulled back from her yellow teeth and grabbed the skin of his neck, slamming him to the floor and snapping at his face when he tried to get up. Her bared teeth were stained pink and left fresh stripes of red across the bridge of his nose.

Watching his dæmon bloody Sotirios was the first time Bonneville had felt fond of her in a long time. This was all she wanted to do, all she _ever_ wanted to do, it seemed. This time he could actually afford to let her be herself.

Esther might have tumbled to the floor with the shock and pain, but Bonneville closed the distance between them and backed her into the nearest wall, grabbing her upper arms to keep her from sliding to the ground next to a bookshelf. The girl had the same doe-eyed look that every girl got when her dæmon was attacked. It was just as if he'd punched her himself, but there was no need to damage his hands when his dæmon could, for once in her miserable existence, make things easier for him.

She'd _finally_ met another dæmon who could understand her twisted language.

It was how he knew that the girl would understand his, even if she hated it. And she _would_.

He let go of her arm with his right hand to grab her jaw, giving her head a rude jostle meant to disorient. " _Never_ believe that you are smarter than me. You _aren't_. Never believe that you get to make up some kind of deal for me. You _don't_. If we deal, I will make the deal." His mouth hung open slightly as he contemplated saying things yet more cruel, but that wouldn't serve his purpose as effectively right now.

Bonneville took a deep breath instead. "Answer my question, Esther, and _tell me_ what you masturbate to." He felt like he was being very patient given the circumstances.

"I don't!" she said.

Bonneville's dæmon snapped at Sotirios and caught his ear hard enough to break the skin before he pulled his head back. He tried to scamper back to his human, but the bigger dæmon tackled him with her whole body and brought him down once again to stand on and over him and laugh uncontrollably. Esther twisted in pain, but Bonneville held fast.

"You're not a _nun_ , you're a schoolgirl," Bonneville said. "I won't ask you again."

Esther's head spun but she managed to give him the the most meager of answers in the smallest of voices: "Boys."

Gerard's once-bright brown eyes seemed to have darkened while his dæmon's eyes now almost glowed in the poorly lit apartment, watching Esther from behind the man. She drooled. Sometimes, on well-lit nights, Sotirios' eyes did the same glowy thing, but the way he looked in the dark was impish, playful, charming. Gerard's dæmon seemed like something other than human entirely.

Bonneville was not amused by Esther's simple little answer. " _Boys_?" he asked, drawing out the word. "Or _men_?"

It only took a moment of reflection to give him the answer in a voice yet _more_ quiet. "Men." Even now some part of her was so committed to being agreeable and well-liked that it stung to speak the truth instead of the answer that her peers would have expected to hear.

His eyes narrowed, his lips pressed together tightly and the edges pulled into the faintest of smiles. She tried to look away but he kept his hold on her jaw. Bonneville squeezed until she looked directly at him again.

"What activities do you imagine, Esther?" he breathed. His left hand abandoned her upper arm to find the topmost button of her blouse so he could unbutton it.

"Kissing," she put forth the idea like he was a teacher asking students to guess the answer to a problem. It sounded almost like she was asking a question, probing to see if she was correct.

"No," Gerard said. He opened two more buttons on her blouse until he could spread her collar apart to see her clavicles and the straps and tops of the cups of her plain, white bra. "I don't think that you think about kissing very much at all. Kissing is the socially acceptable answer for a girl your age, just like liking boys would be. You know that most of your friends want to kiss boys. But you're _just not built that way_ , are you? No. I knew it by your dæmon the moment I saw you."

And she thought desperately: _How?_ But she didn't have anything to say. Even though he'd gone silent, she felt that saying anything would be _interrupting him_ somehow.

His warm finger pads felt over the shape of her collarbones as if reading braille. In their brief lull of noise she heard his dæmon's hoarse voice murmuring into Sotirios' bleeding ear. She couldn't hear the words but she knew through her dæmon that it was something salacious, something even _more_ inappropriate than what Gerard kept talking about.

"You tell me if I guess this right," he said. "When you lie awake and imagine things to pleasure yourself, violence is always on the edge of your thoughts. Hair pulling. _Biting_. Maybe... you imagine yourself held in a hug _so tight_ that your ribs ache and you can't breathe."

She couldn't lie. Speech was absent in that moment. He was _right_ , and she recalled fitful, ill-informed fantasies of lovers embracing so tightly that it hurt to imagine what it would feel like. There were other fantasies of being pinned to her own bed, of grabbing hard at someone's hair. It felt like Gerard had taken a railroad spike and, in all his painful accuracy, pounded it through her chest and into the wall, pinning her in place and robbing her of breath.

Gerard didn't need her to admit that he was right. He could read it on her face. His palm pushed over her chest between her breasts, fingers spreading. It took Esther a few seconds to put together that he was feeling for her heart. 

"How do you know stuff like that?" she asked.

"Your dæmon," he said. Sotirios whined in the back, and Esther tried to get sight of him but Gerard forced her to look up at his eyes again.

"Then why don't I know about you?" she demanded, managing to raise her voice. Gerard's dæmon threw her head back and hooted with amusement while crushing a paw over Sotirios' snout, letting her claws push into the skin between his eyes and above his nose. It made Esther's face twist in pain.

Gerard actually rolled his eyes at her as if she was slow. "If you saw a man and a woman, and they had lioness-formed and lion-formed dæmons, would you think they were very much alike?"

"I mean, kind of, but--"

He cut her off. "Hyenas are _even more_ different than lions."

This new piece of information was the missing element that made things click into place. "We're _not_ the same," she said, and even now she couldn't hide disappointment in her voice. Only _now_ did she feel her eyes start to sting at the corners with tears.

"No," he told her. He leaned in until his nose almost touched her forehead. She could smell him clearly now: cigarettes and some kind of woody cologne. "It's _much_ better than that, Esther. We are _complementary_. You know the word?"

She did, but he assumed that she didn't and kept talking when she didn't say anything.

He gave the most licentious answer she could imagine while the first tear slid out of her right eye. "It means I know how to fill all of your holes. I know what you _need_." He used his left thumb to catch the wayward tear, then brought it to his tongue to lick clean as if that was a perfectly normal thing for a man to do.

"I don't want—"

"That's not important. _Listen_ to me." Gerard's voice deepened and flattened, but he was loud enough for the dæmons to hear him easily. "This is the _only_ deal you get, Esther. If— _and only if!_ —you do everything I say, you can wash the blood off your dæmon and I will take you home tonight. I will tell your family that you are the most delightful young lady in all of France. _You_ will tell them how exciting it was to meet someone with a matching dæmon, and how we had a grand time talking about your education. I'm sure it would make your parents _very_ happy. You know how to lie, don't you? You lie to the other girls at school all the time. I'm sure you also know how to lie to your parents to stay out of trouble."

Bonneville looked over his shoulder to see Sotirios' reaction to his proposal. The dæmon had the same look of bewildered defeat as his girl. The man stepped aside and let go of Esther, watching her rush unsteadily across the room to her dæmon like they'd been held apart by a rubber band. It couldn't have been more than a few yards apart, but they acted like he'd been stretching their physical limits. He did not understand the attachment, but knew they would need to confer.

His dæmon didn't want to get off of Sotirios and for the very first time, Esther surprised him. She lifted an arm and used and elbow to strike at Bonneville's snarling dæmon, but she hopped back in time to avoid any contact. In a few long, quick strides, Bonneville crossed the room and grabbed Esther's arm to tug her back from Sotirios.

"If you get blood on your blouse," he warned, "Your parents might ask questions."

She didn't answer him, but he let go of her arm and looked at his dæmon with a smirk on his face, wishing that her equivalent of a smirk wasn't a hideous baring of yellow teeth. God, she was _ugly_. At least she wasn't ashamed of her appearance any more than he was ashamed of his actions.

He knew what Esther and Sotirios would choose, he just needed them to reach the decision on their own. He watched the dæmon stand and lick away his human's tears for entirely the opposite reason Bonneville had, and watched her stroke the uninjured part of his long, spotted neck. They didn't whisper much to each other because, he knew, they had already decided and were already in agreement. They just wanted this moment of time together.

"Don't stall," he chided.

Sotirios' lips pulled back from his clean, even fangs when Bonneville reached a hand out to Esther. He was willing to ignore her dæmon's anger until the hint of a growl escaped his throat. He reacted just as he did when his own dæmon was out of line and kicked him in the ribs. With a yelp, Sotirios hit the nearby wall, his paws sliding on the floor until Bonneville's dæmon could leap in and take control. Instead of helping Esther to her feet—she was now clutching at her chest as if she was the one who had been kicked—he reached into her thick brown hair, taking a fistful close to her scalp and twisting his grip to wrap it around his hand. He hauled her to her feet, wrapping his other arm around her waist while she coughed and sputtered. She felt so small, so easy to carry. If he ever had to, it wouldn't be difficult to wrap her in fabric and add weights and toss her into The Seine.

"We'll be in the bedroom," he told his dæmon. She'd already started scolding Sotirios, but shifted to grabbing his neck with her teeth and tugging him along after Bonneville.

He did not allow her in his bedroom. She snored, she smelled, she laughed in her sleep. His room wasn't large enough to strain the distance between man and dæmon, but only if she stuck near enough to the door. He would leave the job of moving Sotirios to her. 

He and Esther had a deal.


	3. No Dæmons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the one with the porn.

Esther reached for the door when it closed before the dæmons could follow them.

"Do you _want_ him to see?" Gerard asked her pointedly.

Of course Sotirios would know what happened to her in here, just like she would know what would happen to him out there. But no, she didn't want him to see her and he wouldn't want her to see him, whatever happened to him. Knowing in their mutual heart would be bad enough.

"No," she said, then coughed one last time, regaining her footing.

Gerard let go of her hair reluctantly, but pushed her out at arm's length with his heavy hands on her shoulders. "Get undressed, Esther."

She blinked. It felt like an impossible command even though, logically, she knew it was plenty doable. Almost half of her shirt was already undone, and her fingers weren't broken. Her arms felt heavy watching Gerard standing before her. The natural ease with which he unbuttoned his own shirt in front of her only served to distract her further from the assigned task. Somehow it was hard to rationalize that he had a body under his clothes when it seemed like his face was just a mask that he could change and his hands were made of some kind of metal designed to crush her in their grip.

He just couldn't be human! But he had a dæmon, no matter how awful she seemed, and he had flesh. He even chest hair that trailed down to his navel and seemed to reach into his pants. He shrugged off the unbuttoned shirt and let it fall to the floor. 

"You _are_ a virgin," he sighed. Not that it was a bad thing, but it didn't hurt to take a stab at Esther's self-esteem there to pretend he was doing her a favor. Ideally he would have been able to sell it as if he was relieving her of some burden, but she wasn't _that_ much of a fool. In his imagination he toyed with the idea of _impressing_ himself upon her like she was a baby bird with a blank sense of sexual identity. That wasn't the case, of course. He was convinced that he wouldn't have to do very much to sculpt her to his tastes, convinced that she was meant to complement him.

"You were supposed to do what I said, young lady," he reminded her coldly, but she still looked bewildered, now staring at his torso. Bonneville was slender but not without muscle. For an experimental theologist he felt he was in good shape, but it had never been his priority. Esther's wide brown eyes scanning his torso up and down fed his ego enough that he wasn't annoyed that she wasn't stripping down like he was.

Even after this stern reminder, Esther's hands hung at her sides and made no movements. Bonneville recognized the difference between fear and obstinance and was perfectly aware that this wasn't the latter, so he grabbed for her shirt. Esther didn't tug away from him, but she looked away and stared at his empty wall above a bookcase.

His home was fairly barren, even his bedroom. He had moved several times in the last few years—his dæmon made it hard to stay on good terms with neighbors if they were awake at night and she felt like laughing at nothing—and it was easier when he didn't own many things. He kept everything of great importance at his office at the chapel anyway. The bedroom held books that he was unable to part with, a desk with loose papers and a lamp for when he had ideas in the middle of the night, and a bed that would give one sleeper room to spread out, but which was never meant to have two sleepers.

"It's going to hurt," he told her in the manner of a man discussing the weather, pulling her slender arms from the sleeves of her shirt until he could toss it on the floor with his own. With the words and the pleasure of revealing more of Esther's vulnerable flesh, he gave up all efforts towards self-control. His cock had been stiffening ever-so-gradually since he'd managed to get her into his home, but now he breathed out and was all at aware of the blood rushing through him to make his pants painfully tight.

"You _like_ the pain," she said, still working to wrap her head the idea, perhaps.

"Yes, though I prefer _your_ pain," he told her, and spun her around by her shoulders she could face the bed. Undoing a bra was so much easier when he could see the fucking clasps. The moment he plucked it apart and the garment hung loose he reached a hand around Esther's front to snatch at the cups and pull them away from her chest. He hurled it across the room in annoyance and used is right hand to grope her breast. She loosed a cry when he squeezed her small breast too hard—that being a relative term—so he leaned forward, bending them both at the hips and pinning her face down on the bed where her noises could be muffled.

He bucked his hips against her ass without giving it any thought, it was just something that _needed_ to happen right then in that moment. 

How many times had she had a fantasy where some man ill-defined by her imagination or dreams rubbed his equally hard-to-picture cock against her ass or between her thighs? It was too many times to count. So much easier to imagine a man behind her rather than in front of her; that way she didn't have to give him a specific face or identity and didn't have to confront the shame of her own sexuality. If the man was behind her she didn't have to try to imagine what a real erection would look like when she had only seen illustrations of flaccid penises in educational books vetted by the Magisterium or in old paintings in museums.

She resented every fantasy when his hips crashed against her ass and she had to feel the shape of him through their clothes.

Her knees gave out with the surprise of the impact, feet sliding back and out, her abdomen hitting the bed. Esther wanted to get up or try to crawl across, but Gerard slid a hand between their bodies to pin her down at the small of her back. 

"I asked you whether you masturbated to boys or men," he said, reaching under her with his other hand to unbutton her skirt. Esther tried to hide her face even further in the sheets. "Do _you_ know why you prefer to imagine men? _I_ do, Esther. It's because you know that boys are just as clueless as you are. But you're impatient. You don't want to be _fumbled_ with. You want to think that whoever has your body in his hands will know what to do with it."

"It's not—" she tried to protest before his words even sank in, but her thought process was slowed further when he pulled her skirt down until it pooled over her feet. Gerard straightened up and she took the chance to turn over and face him, covering her chest with her arms and pinning her thighs together. Esther tried to pull her knees up to her chest, but Gerard caught one of her legs and yanked her off her socks and shoes.

"Other leg," Gerard demanded, dropping her bare ankle back to the sheets.

She hadn't even brought herself to try to wrench her leg from his grip. And now that he stood at the bedside and towered over her, she hesitantly extended her other pale leg for him to tear away her footwear. All she had left were white panties.

 _What is wrong with me?_ She wondered as she processed his interpretation of her sexuality. _What made me like this?_

Gerard gave her a brief appraising look with eyes that were too intense for her to meet, then bent down to untie his shoes as well. Outside the door came the sound of the dæmons snarling at each other. Gerard wavered where he knelt, and in the next moment Esther felt a sharp pain in her shoulder, a ghostly feeling of puncturing and squeezing that made her feel weak and oddly un-present in her own body. Sotirios was in pain, in trouble, and her heart ached that a wall separated them. It felt like just a moment that she shut her eyes and clutched at her shoulder, breathing hard and thinking of her dæmon, but it was probably longer. She heard Gerard bang on the door with his fist to communicate something to his dæmon, and then there was a period of time where the pain lessened as she took deep breaths.

That ended when she felt the mattress shift with his added weight. Her eyes shot open to see him naked, creeping over her on hands and knees. His curly hair wasn't quote long enough to hang down to hide his eyes, and she diverted her attention from his piercing gaze just as soon as she met it. So she saw his erection, red and throbbing between his legs.

Bonneville saw the moment that she seemed to unfreeze and he grabbed her leg before she could try to get away from him on the bed. He grabbed high enough on her thigh that he could squeeze as hard as he possibly could, hard enough to dig his nails in and hard enough to _bruise_ where no one would see.

"Look at you. Growing up before my eyes," he said. He sat up on his knees, looming over her, and used his other hand to grab her shaking hand and bring her palm to his shaft. He shuddered. She made the most satisfying little noise when she inhaled that made him grin in the same dangerous manner that his dæmon did. Outside the room came the annoying sound of her laughter, which Bonneville would have ignored, but it drew Esther's attention away from his body.

He let go of her thigh so he could plant his elbow on the bed and hold himself horizontally over her, guiding her hand farther down until he could make her hand cup his balls and learn the texture of his pubic hair and flesh. "What do you think, Esther?"

This was enough of a taunt to make her look back at his eyes, finally. "I _hate_ you," she told him quietly. He _throbbed_.

He breathed out a laugh through his nose and half of his mouth smiled while the other half merely showed his teeth, just like his dæmon. "If you think I'm doing any of this because I want your approval, you're dead wrong. Unlike _you_ , _I_ don't desperately need to be liked by everyone I meet." He let go of her hand, and she withdrew it from him and once again drew it across her chest. Bonneville knew that this insult had affected her because a red flush spread from her cheeks down to her clavicles and upper chest. His dæmon laughed reflexively outside the room.

If it had been earlier in the day, he would have loved to spend more time scaring her, more time teaching her about his body, more time leaving a variety of bruises on her in places they wouldn't show through her clothes. But he couldn't keep her too late and it was already evening. He grabbed the hem of her panties and dragged them down her thighs, past where a hand-shaped bruise was beginning to form.

She sniffed, but didn't cry this time. "You _are_ going to let me go home after?" she asked.

He couldn't be angry with her for double-checking and threw her panties aside carelessly. "When we're done, you and your dæmon are going to need to get cleaned up. _Then_ I'll take you home _myself_ , alive and in one piece." Bonneville grabbed her knees to pull them apart, and a few moments after he finished speaking he felt her muscles stop resisting to allow him access.

The feeling of the skin on Gerard's cock had not left Esther's palm. Her skin still tingled with the memory of its heat, texture, the weight of his balls in her palm. None of it had been what she had expected—the flexibility and _softness_ of the flesh on the shaft had especially caught her by surprise—but she could not deny that on some deep, animal level, it was pleasant to feel a man's erect penis.

God help her. Maybe Gerard was right and he knew what she wanted. _Nothing_ could be more frightening or make her feel more like a _pervert_.

She watched the ceiling and held her breath as he spread her legs wide and slid his body between them. Esther braced herself for penetration, hugging her torso so tightly that she couldn't have inhaled even if she wanted to. Gerard didn't force his way into her, and instead his precum smeared over Esther's mons and lower abdomen. The touch of his glans was so hot that any time it moved the little trail of precum left behind felt ice-cold by comparison. Gerard prised her arms apart from her chest next. It didn't matter how hard her nervous muscles had set themselves, he was stronger.

" _Breathe_ , you little fool," he scolded her softly. "You think holding your breath and getting tense will help somehow? Do you hold your breath when you touch yourself and fantasize about men roughing you up when you're in your own bed?"

Without waiting for an answer, his right hand dove for her vulva and parted her pink labia, pressing his first two fingers hard against her clit. It was enough to make her gasp for breath, and this time Sotirios yelped outside the door, a high-pitched animal-like noise that Bonneville recognized as surprise more than anything else.

"No," she answered through gritted teeth. But then, she wasn't terrified at home.

He moved his fingers in fast little circles and pressed hard. She tried to pull her hips down into the mattress, but he kept his pressure and rhythm consistent. His left hand pawed her breast and he hunched over to wrap his lips around her opposite nipple. His mouth was warmer than his palm, but all Esther could think was that it was so much stimulation all at once. Without any conscious thought, Esther pulled her thighs up but they only managed to squeeze Gerard's sides. Her hands jumped up to grab at him, but when her fingers wove into his dark curls, she couldn't bring herself to tug his hair and pull his head away.

It felt _good_. His fingers were bigger than hers and had none of the shame-filled hesitation that her own did when she played with herself; the pleasure he drew out of her swollen clit was better than she'd ever managed. It felt _good_. This time the hand on her breast didn't squeeze too hard, just used his warm palm to make her nipples harden. It felt good. His mouth formed a vacuum around her nipple, his tongue lapping at it from every direction, entirely unpredictable, energetic. It felt _good_.

She _hated_ it.

Her back arched, pushing her chest up into his face, but just as she reacted that way, he let go of her breasts, he stopped rubbing her clit. Her fingers fell out of his hair when she realized she'd been touching him back.

"I knew it," he said slyly. One of his fingers, she couldn't tell which, ran up and down her slit to illustrate to her that she was wet. "You needed a man who knew what he was doing. And now you're _so wet_ I'm going to have to wash the blankets to get your _scent_ off of them."

Esther had nothing to object with. There was something wrong with her that he was able to have this effect on her body. Something broken inside of her that she couldn't yet understand. There _had_ to be.

"Listen," he said, now grabbing her chin with his sloppy, wet hand to make sure she would look right into his hungry eyes. "It will hurt, unless you're lucky. Don't embarrass yourself by shouting."

He let go of her before she could react, leaving the smell of _girl_ along her jaws for her to inhale. With no further warning, he grabbed her hips, his cock, and forced his way inside of her. Esther grunted in discomfort, feeling a pinch and as he pushed deeper, a stretching pain as he spread her open. She tried to spread her thighs to alleviate pressure on herself, and Gerard used this to grab her ass and pull her farther down his cock until he could bury himself no deeper inside her body.

He lay his torso on top of hers, not crushing her, but still pushing her down into the bed with his face resting over her shoulder. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and she could feel his heartbeats inside of her. He breathed out long and slow, and even though she couldn't see his face she imagined that it was oddly peaceful. She found that the pain faded out quickly as they lay still and she was allowed to breathe, and was surprised by how similar the feeling of having a man inside of her was to what she had imagined on her own.

Outside the door came the sound of claws scrabbling on wood floor and dæmon bodies slamming against one another. They were either fighting or doing something else. Esther didn't want to speculate about poor Sotirios anymore than she wanted him to think about her. But she knew that whatever it was, he didn't like it. Her heart ached for him and she twitched under his body, reaching an arm towards the door.

As if he read her mind, Gerard said, "Don't worry about them. They're just doing what comes naturally. Just like we are."

"This isn't natural," she said. Her voice came out strained.

He laughed into the blankets, then used an elbow to prop himself up. "I don't need to be a natural philosopher to know this is the most natural thing in the world. You were _made_ to take my cock, Esther. Just look at how wet I made you in no time. You can hate me all you want, your body _loves_ this and I can feel that. You feel it. They feel it. Now again, keep the noise down."

He pulled several inches of himself out of her and immediately missed the tight warmth of her body. It was such a shame that he couldn't just keep her here like some kind of pet or toy to fuck and torment. He put his hand on her hip and thrust into her again.

And again, and again, with malicious force. Even though he'd told her to keep quiet, part of him wanted to hear her howl.

Esther sweated, her muscles tense. Even her pelvic floor was flexed and tense with stress. He made her squirm and writhe, watching her face while he fucked her. At first when she began to moan, they were soft little whimpers. Fine. But The noise built up until she had to bite her lip to keep from making too much sound, so he had to pause after a thrust so hard that the smacking of their flesh seemed deafening.

"Stop biting your lip," he said, finding himself unexpectedly winded. "It'll leave a mark you have to explain. Bite my shoulder."

"What?" she panted. 

"Somewhere it won't show when I work," he said. Bonneville scooped her up, pulling them both into an upright position where he knelt and held her body against his with an arm looped around her lower back. Her tense, trembling thighs clung to his sides and he half believed that he'd have to pry her off of him when he was done with her. "You need to be quiet, regardless. There are still people in this building other than me and you don't sound like a woman."

"What do I sound like?" she asked, breathing even harder than he was. She'd barely done any moving, how absurd that she should be so winded!

 _What a stupid question,_ he thought. He pushed his teeth against her ear. "You sound like _filthy little girl_."

To punctuate his insult, he bucked his hips up, drilling into her cunt with wet, slapping abandon. She took him up on his offer and sank her teeth into his shoulder. The pain of her teeth was sudden and sharp, but it centered Bonneville's focus and excited him. His short nails were still long enough to rake across Esther's back while he held her close. She returned the favor with even sharper nails wherever her hands tried to cling to him, leaving long red marks. He felt her moans and whines muffle and die against his shoulder each time he thrust into her.

Bonneville took another glance out the window. Almost dark. He cursed under his breath and slid his right hand between them to thumb her clit. Instead of clawing a lattice of wounds into her back he grabbed her hair with his left hand. "It's time for you to cum, Esther. The sooner you do it, the sooner this is over."

She didn't want to cum for Gerard, but his thumb rubbing her clit brought her closer and closer. "Why do I have to do it? You could finish--"

" _No,_ " he snarled back in her ear, his hand tightening in her hair. Each hot breath he exhaled between thrusts felt like scalding steam being expelled from a vent. "You're going to cum. You're going to remember it. I bet you fantasized about _this_ too. After all, if your imaginary man who knows how to fuck can _force_ you to cum, you don't have to feel _guilty_ about it later right?"

She bit him again in a slightly different place and screamed her frustration into him. _How could he hit upon it so easily?_

"Real life isn't like fantasy," he said, and against everything Esther wanted for herself, she felt a familiar tension in her lower abdomen growing and growing, forced arousal pooling in her gut and shoving her in a helpless cascade towards orgasm. Gerard purred to her: "This is your fault, too."

Her whole body tensed up, shuddered, and she came. Her incisors drew blood on his shoulder, but she didn't notice until he had to pull her off of him. She didn't fully realize why he'd dropped her back on the bed until he slid out of her and she felt suddenly empty, incomplete. She tasted his blood and started to sit up when he came on her thighs, her mons, her belly, His hips twitching in the air and his eyes shut, mouth hanging open but teeth curiously not bared.

It was the most vulnerable she thought she had seen him, but that thought was drowned by waves of self disgust. Sotirios howled through the door.


	4. Clean Up

Gerard prevented Esther from rushing instantly to Sotirios when he opened the bathroom door. Her dæmon was a bedraggled mess who looked as bad as she felt. And he stank.

"Wait," the man said. "You need to take a bath. Then he needs to take a bath."

Esther caught a glimpse of Gerard glowering at his dæmon, and she laughed back at him like she was choking on something and found it funny.

She let him draw her a bath and get in. She didn't realize how sore she was until she had to sit in a bath of warm water. Gerard didn't leave her alone in the bathroom, but he didn't keep Sotirios out either. Her dæmon had never looked worse. He trembled and the stench of piss with hints of blood seemed to spread.

"Wash the cum off of you," Gerard told her. He made sure to hand Esther soap and a loofah, politely avoiding Sotirios. He dabbed iodine on his shoulder where she had bitten him. "Keep your hair out of the water. You can brush it before we leave. Hurry, the faster you get cleaned up, the faster I take you home."

She didn't waste time but did discover the Hell that was trying to get cum off of her skin. She realized then why Gerard had made sure she didn't get any on Sotirios by accident.

Bonneville entered and exited the bathroom several times. He got dressed and teased his hair into a position that he found most fashionable. He collected all of Esther's discarded clothing and left it on the bathroom counter. He put her bookbag by the door with her shoes. He kicked his dæmon for being a stupid bitch who had pissed on her fellow dæmon and made clean up more of a chore for him. It was worth the residual ache in his ribs while he sprayed the wood floors with cleaners meant for animal waste. She laughed at his predicament, but he described to her in detail how he was considering using a pair of kitchen scissors to snip off one of her idiotic, bat-like ears.

By the time he returned to the bathroom the last time, Esther and Sotirios had traded places. The dæmon looked absurd in the tub with Esther dumping water over his fur and head. Bonneville nudged Esther aside and sprayed Sotirios' fur down with the anti-urine cleaner, kindly avoiding his eyes. He handed Esther the bottle of iodine for the injuries.

"We get our stories straight," he told her, and leaned against the counter with his arms crossed over his chest. "We met in the park. You were harrassed by some boys."

Listlessly she said, "Just one boy. He had dog dæmon... some kind of big grey mongrel. Sotirios fought her. You and your dæmon showed up and helped me out, they ran off. That's how he got his injuries."

Bonneville smiled at the story she cooked up. "Good. You were grateful to me, we were both happy to meet a stranger who had a similar unusual dæmon so we walked together to my place to clean up Sotirios."

"We lost track of the time," Esther added bitterly, making sure the last of the cleaning solution and blood was clear from her dæmon. He stepped out of the tub onto the floor mat and let his human towel him down as best she could.

Bonneville rolled up his sleeve and unplugged the tub.

"And if you deviate from the story," he said calmly, rinsing his hands off in the sink, "Not that I think you will—I will tell them about what a slut you are. That you begged to suck my cock, how you told me you like to go to the park to find any men who will have you. You understand?"

Somehow she let this blindside her and the mere _thought_ of him saying it made her heart hurt. Esther just shook her head. "I won't tell."

"Good," Gerard said. He handed her her clothes from the counter one piece at a time so that she had to get dressed in front of him. The hand-shaped bruise had formed fully on her thigh and she caught him stealing smug little looks at it.

"What's your name," she asked. She deserved more than _just_ Gerard.

"Bonneville," he said. If Esther knew anything about experimental theology she would have known that she was in the presence of someone that much of the community would have said was a brilliant mind. "Yours?"

"Bardin," she said.

"Any relation to Luc Bardin?" Gerard asked, eyes narrowing. "His dæmon has the form of a hen?"

She wanted to lie to him, but there was no way she'd get away with it if he intended to take her home himself anyway. "That's my father," she said.

"I've met him," Gerard said. "At his gallery. Not a clever man, is he?"

He wasn't, but the insult still stung Esther as she finished buttoning up her shirt. "Can we _go_ now?"

Bonneville lit up a cigarette the _moment_ they were outside.

Esther did her best to walk normally on the way home, but Bonneville could tell that she was sore. She must have caught the way he kept looking at her sideways and smirking.

"How's your shoulder?" she asked, trying to return a fraction of the viciousness that she had been dealt. He wondered if she remembered the taste of his blood.

"Never better," he said fondly, and he meant it. It was a good pain. He watched her stew.

His dæmon never stuck close to him. He watched Sotirios do the opposite with Esther, standing between his human and Bonneville. "Stand on her other side," He said. "Or people will think you don't like me."

"I _don't_ like you," Sotirios said.

"Then _pretend_ ," he hissed back. Esther whispered something to him, and the dæmon reluctantly switched to walking on Esther's opposite side, leaving the humans to walk as if friends. Bonneville made no effort this time to loop his arm through hers.

It wasn't a tremendously long walk. They crossed back through the park that he'd found her in, then only a few blocks before she stopped him wordlessly by grabbing the sleeve of his long coat in front of a slender house squished between two larger ones.

"Ready to lie?" he asked.

She nodded, and went to the door first.

Esther's father was the only one still by the door and he hurried her inside. His dæmon stopped Sotirios in the kitchen to strut around him and look him over, quickly expressing her concern. Esther was fast to introduce Mr. Bonneville and was frightened by how easily she and Gerard sold the lie they had planned. How synergistic they could be, complementing each other's parts of the lie. Just like Gerard had said.

Things deviated from Esther's plan when she was sent to bed before Gerard left.

"Goodnight, Miss Bardin," he said with perfect pleasantness, and seeing this version of him reminded her of how easily she had been fooled.

She kept the happy tone. "Good-bye, Mr. Bonneville." And while swallowing her disgust: "Thank you."

She passed Geneviève's room at the top of the stairs. Of all the people she might have considered trusting with her secret, Geneviève would have been the first if her sister wasn't still angry with her. Esther was sure she'd be extra furious when she learned that Esther had come home late after a dangerous event without being punished just because she was "lucky" enough to have a strange man help her. Geneviève would have been in trouble for being home after dark. Life wasn't fair.

Esther kept her bedroom door open, hoping to hear the front door open and close with Gerard's exit while she prepared to sleep but the sound didn't come. Sotirios waited in the shadows on the landing, lying down but with ears erect where he would be unseen. She felt a surge of fear in him and crept to the landing on hands and knees to listen.

Gerard Bonneville and Luc Bardin drank wine in the kitchen. Esther lay on her stomach, huddled against Sotirios for warmth and comfort, her mouth open.

" _He was supposed to leave!_ " she whispered. But no, they had never actually discussed how that would happen. She had just assumed, _foolishly_ , that he would depart. Her heart pounded as she tuned her ears to the quiet talk downstairs.

The men were finishing discussing something about her father's gallery and the hairs on the back of Esther's neck stood on end. Something bad was coming.

"Esther confessed to me that she's been struggling in maths," Gerard said. "My work at the chapel has been slow lately and it seems she has time after school, I'd be happy to tutor her."

She clenched her jaw so tightly that she thought her teeth would shatter. Sotirios began to shake at her side.

Her father didn't waste any time in agreeing to this. Esther dropped her head into her hands. No, no, no. This needed to be over forever. No amount of good grades from being tutored by a smart man would make up for the awful things she knew he would do and say given the chance. She wrapped an arm around Sotirios' neck and he cuddled into her. She had to listen to her father hash out details with Bonneville, falling for the man's charm as easily as she had earlier in the day.

Eventually she heard the grinding of chairs as the men stood up, and Esther risked standing as well to look down at the front door. Gerard's dæmon lay against the door, waiting to leave but minding her manners, and finally the man himself walked from the kitchen into her line of view, insisting he could see himself out.

His dæmon stood and looked directly up at Esther, then bared her hateful fangs. Gerard followed her gaze briefly and saw Esther with her hands gripping the bannister so hard that her knuckles turned white.

He winked at her and saw himself out. It wasn't over.

**Author's Note:**

> I warned you there was no nice ending. I'll be returning to this work from time to time to edit this story as I do with most of my work. I like to tinker and I know that no matter how many times I read over something there will always be things I miss.
> 
> A friend who read this commented their uncertainty as to whether I was a sadist or a masochist. The answer is both: I am an artist.
> 
> Comments from anonymous readers are enabled because I know many people aren't comfortable leaving comments with their usernames on when it comes to very dark adult content.


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